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My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

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71–80 of 223 posts

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#71

I agree that this is dumb of IFTTT. But I am all in favor of a 'recipe' that consists of "startup does dumb stuff=>Maciej writes a hilarious takedown=>I LOL so hard people ask me what's going on from two rooms away". Can someone implement the API for that, please?

Comedy is one of the great things in life that just wasn't meant to scale.

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The site doesn't provide recipes, it provides endpoints (API calls) that users can write recipes to use. How it worked until now: 1) IFTTT wrote glue code to interface with a site's published API, and IFTTT could then write recipes to use the site. IFTTT thus stitched together other sites published APIs as a service. How IFTTT has decided it will work from now on: 1) IFTTT comes to you and orders you to write private…

Wouldn't you be performing this work because you believe it will facilitate the transfer of traffic to your site? Aren't you comitting to make changes as and when ifttt change their API so that you can continue to receive their calls? Sites/services can just walk away if they don't want the traffic. No one's obliged to pay or do anything they don't want to.

Part of the point is that IFTTT has a fully working connector today, and is just going to turn it off in a few days' time if Maciej doesn't sign this new agreement. And Is then sending emails to his customers laying the blame at his feet.

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#73
I am the CEO over at IFTTT. I apologize for any misunderstanding our communications today have caused. I built the Pinboard Channel on IFTTT and have maintained it for years. I am also a paying customer of Pinboard! I’ve built for hundreds of platforms and any changes to those platforms by default suck. At IFTTT, we've been on the receiving end of platform changes too many times to count. I want to make sure we do it better. Pinboard is a beloved service. Every service is, on IFTTT or not. We care about the people who use them and build them. The changes we are asking for are indeed more work, but we know they will lead to a better Pinboard Channel on IFTTT in the long term. I'd love to see Pinboard stay on IFTTT and am willing to give them the time they need and even come over to help myself!

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#74

I am the CEO over at IFTTT. I apologize for any misunderstanding our communications today have caused. I built the Pinboard Channel on IFTTT and have maintained it for years. I am also a paying customer of Pinboard! I’ve built for hundreds of platforms and any changes to those platforms by default suck. At IFTTT, we've been on the receiving end of platform changes too many times to count. I want to make sure we do it…

The things you are saying here sound like your attitude is in the right place, but did you actually read the TOS your legal team sent out?

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#75

I'd spend money on a Yahoo Pipes + IFTTT solution with some kind of guarantee they're not going to vanish overnight. You know, like a Pinboard.in style company. I think we need to clone Maciej.

What we need is a common interchange protocol, not a specific service.

This is kind of an idea a coworker and I have been toying with. At it's core, all you really need is a pub-sub server, with daemons publishing and consuming some JSON blobs. Redis is a pub-sub server out of the box, write some simple Python wrappers that poll web pages, RSS feeds, etc. and publish, and on subscribes perform actions (i.e. hit the API!)

I would like to convert a script I have which polls from my Gmail for credit card charge notifications and publishes to Airtable (which works great for this task!) to a more-general Gmail listener which publishes, and a more-general Airtable publisher which can be setup to record certain messages.

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#76
post #74

I am the CEO over at IFTTT. I apologize for any misunderstanding our communications today have caused. I built the Pinboard Channel on IFTTT and have maintained it for years. I am also a paying customer of Pinboard! I’ve built for hundreds of platforms and any changes to those platforms by default suck. At IFTTT, we've been on the receiving end of platform changes too many times to count. I want to make sure we do it…

The things you are saying here sound like your attitude is in the right place, but did you actually read the TOS your legal team sent out?

Yes I did. Agree that we could make some improvements

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#77

I am the CEO over at IFTTT. I apologize for any misunderstanding our communications today have caused. I built the Pinboard Channel on IFTTT and have maintained it for years. I am also a paying customer of Pinboard! I’ve built for hundreds of platforms and any changes to those platforms by default suck. At IFTTT, we've been on the receiving end of platform changes too many times to count. I want to make sure we do it…

Having spent countless hours working with third party apis that are poorly documented and business critical I can understand how unexpected changes can be frustrating. But asking people to do things your way with no incentive is even more frustrating for everyone. It comes off as you not respecting their time or the product and apis they have already built.

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#78
> 4. Confidentiality You agree not to disclose (or allow access to) the Developer Tool (or any information derived therefrom) to any third party and will limit access to the Developer Tool (and any derived information) to your employees who are developing your IFTTT channel. In support of this obligation, you will apply at least the same security that you use to protect your own most confidential information.

Did anyone seriously think this through? What about companies that have among their "most confidential information" data, like passwords, crypto keys, confidential memos, etc., that they'd never store on an Internet-connected machine?

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#79

I am the CEO over at IFTTT. I apologize for any misunderstanding our communications today have caused. I built the Pinboard Channel on IFTTT and have maintained it for years. I am also a paying customer of Pinboard! I’ve built for hundreds of platforms and any changes to those platforms by default suck. At IFTTT, we've been on the receiving end of platform changes too many times to count. I want to make sure we do it…

On one hand, you can justify the work as a part of making a more reliable platform without per-service shims, but presumably you could have asked the services to adopt a better open API rather than IFTTT-specific integration.

But why did you ignore all the commentary on your TOS? Are you endorsing those terms as the company you want to be?

Re: My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

#80

I am the CEO over at IFTTT. I apologize for any misunderstanding our communications today have caused. I built the Pinboard Channel on IFTTT and have maintained it for years. I am also a paying customer of Pinboard! I’ve built for hundreds of platforms and any changes to those platforms by default suck. At IFTTT, we've been on the receiving end of platform changes too many times to count. I want to make sure we do it…

Having spent countless hours working with third party apis that are poorly documented and business critical I can understand how unexpected changes can be frustrating. But asking people to do things your way with no incentive is even more frustrating for everyone. It comes off as you not respecting their time or the product and apis they have already built.

We very much respect Pinboard's time and are willing to give them just about as much of it as they need. Am willing to spend our time as well! We are looking to improve all of these integrations over time, beyond what their API can support and the best way for Pinboard to do this is to own that integration completely.
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